The Keep:Pirate Cove/Ideas
This page is for the ideas the Pirates are considering sending to Habitica staff. Instructions from @Alys: "Edit them to merge near-duplicate ideas, incorporate feedback into the main ideas, etc. We wouldn't need to be too careful about preserving the original wording." The original posts are available at http://oldgods.net/habitrpg/pirate_cove.html Alys is happy to explain any vetos (see also her posts), and willing to consider counter-arguments in at least some cases. Make public guild creation harder *Keep in mind about this section: We should avoid raising too many barriers to participation during the first few crucial weeks of someone joining. **Setting limits and requirements pre-judges peoples' needs and abilities and sends a message that we don't tolerate people who can't get it right the first time. *Limit guild creation to people who have been members over a certain amount of time. Veto by @Alys *Guild creation costs a mystic hourglass. Veto by @Alys *Limit guild creation to people who have won a gem challenge run by another player. Veto by @Alys *Can't create a guild until a certain level. Veto by @Alys *Temporary bandaid: double the gem requirement. Veto by @Alys *Require owners to read community guidelines and agree to report them when violated. Like moderator deputies. *Require owners to say they searched for duplicates before creating a guild. *Before you create a guild, you have to get two others privatized/deleted. Later, when balance is restored, put an automatic limit on the number of guilds, and get a message once that limit is reached, "Sorry, no more free guild slots at the moment - but you can help create one by doing such-and-such to get a guild privatized/deleted." Gradually adapt the limit by making it dependent on number of active users. **A page where "number of guilds" is shown in the same way storage usually is: X existing guilds, M guilds possible at the max, F free guilds. Send a warning to players if the numbers get too high. **There's a chance it would result in players harassing guilds that shouldn't be considered for deletion. Safeguards would be needed. E.g., you can FIND a guild that might be suitable for deletion, but you only report it to the Pirates and let them handle it from there. **You'd get people buying and selling guild spots, with real money or gems. *Guild application approval process - a guild idea needs to be approved by a mod. **A potential guild creator posts their idea in a guild like the Pirate Cove, so that experienced players can comment on it, and then a mod can make a final decision, probably largely influenced by the comments. ***The Guild Leaders & Challenge Creators guild could do this. ***The experienced players could also give advice about what makes a good guild, point the potential creator at the appropriate wiki pages, talk about the Community Guidelines - basically incorporate several of the suggestions from "give guild creators more info" (see full section below) to make it a mentoring, advisory, and approval process. ***The more community-run it is, the better, because then it's the whole community working with potential creators to improve Habitica AND to ensure that the creator's idea has the best chance of success, rather than only a harsh-seeming statement of "you must get a mod to approve your idea". *Require new guilds to have a minimum number of members prior to actual creation. Eg. I create my new guild, and I must invite (and have them accept) at least four other people in order for the guild to become public. I could advertise my guild in the tavern or one of the larger guilds, or I could invite friends/family I know in the real world. *Have guild creation be Private by default, and creators can make the guild public after it's formed. *Someone could make a private guild, advertise it in the bulletin board, advertise challenges made in it, and could then apply for it to become public, either by paying a lot of gems or through an automatic system that allows it to be made public for free once it gets enough members/activity. *Make a much clearer difference between public and private guilds and reflect this in the ease of their creation. **Reasons for creating Private Guilds: These include -- a place for people who are friends outside Habitica to be able to chat when they are in different parties; a place for someone to keep their private challenges; discussion of things that the guild members would rather not share publicly, i.e. there is a way to control membership and if someone transgresses, they can be booted and not invited back. Reasons for creating Public Guilds: A place to talk with any Habitican, in public, about a particular topic. These could be help and support guilds related to improving one's life (all the health and organisation guilds) or just places to talk about a favourite activity (e.g. the reading and fandom guilds). **The process of creating a private guild remains the same, but to create a public guild you have to pay more (say 12 gems), recruit at least one deputy/fellow guild member, have to read some sort of This is What is Involved in Running a Public Guild How To (and click a box to say you've done it), and perhaps put the idea to a group of experienced Habitcans who can advise on the potential viability and offer support and guidance on successful guild running. ***If they just want a place to talk with a few friends about the popular anime of the day, then they're likely to go for the cheaper option, especially if there's a note about how if the guild proves successful enough, they could pay 9 gems and a mod makes it public.. Give guild creators more info about making a quality guild *First, make a wiki guild page for the "Guild Leaders & Challenge Creators". It could become a more official wiki page later. An official wiki page, "Guild creation and Maintenance Tips" has been created. Discussions about it happen on its Talk page and in the Guild Leaders & Challenge Creators guild. **Include more "how to make a good guild" stuff in the wiki page about guilds. **Ask potential guild creators to read this first. *Include a tutorial on what running a successful guild entails in the Create a Guild dialogue. *People don't search the list before creating a guild. (Some new players don't even realize it can be searched.) We could have an "are you sure this isn't a duplicate/subtopic/useless guild?" message show when people create a guild. *A big/flashy/really visible link to the guilds guide at the page where you create a new guild. "you wanna create a new guild? first check if it is not already there!" (and possibly some text on how defunct and dead guilds will be hunted down and deleted). *Have an automatic invite to the Guild Leaders and Challenge Creators guild go to guild leaders when a new guild is created. *Offer new leaders a list of active experienced leaders who are willing to mentor new ones. Make the unwieldy guilds list more "wieldy" *Allow guilds list to be sorted by very general categories. **Maybe use category list from the Guilds Guide. ***Guilds Guide categories aren't ideal for the guilds list. My ideas: 1) World of Habitica (Party Wanted, Newbies, Library, etc.). 2) Health (ADHDers, Vegetarians, Early to Bed, etc.). 3) Lifestyle & Self-Improvement (Introverts, The Basics, role play guilds, fandom guilds, etc.). 4) Jobs & Hobbies. 5) Languages & Localities. I'd collapse the "Other Sites" into wherever they fit topically, e.g. r/ADHD would be in Health, and I'd put Good Causes in with Lifestyle. This is generally based on making the categories as intuitive as possible, while making the number of over-1000-members guilds more equal between categories, and keeping the total number of categories to five. **Allow subcategories. *Allow the list to be filtered by tags. The guild creator could tag the guild, adding two or three tags if necessary so the guild will come up on different lists. But some people would just add all the tags to their guilds to attract many members, and others would not add any. Also, this might duplicate the current search functionality. *Display creation dates (a time stamp would first have to be added to the guild data - as it is now, guild creation time doesn't get saved) *Sort by... **Members: number of members, number of active members (logged in during the last week) **Chat: most recent chat, number of chat posts total (big guilds would all cap at 200), chat posts per month during the last 3 months, frequency of chat posts (number of posts divided by time since oldest post), recent frequency of chat posts (If posts older than 1 month haven't scrolled out yet, then number of chat posts during last month divided by 1 month. If they've scrolled out, then 200 divided by time since oldest post), **Alphabetically, **Dates: creation date, date owner last logged in, **Number of challenges **Sorting the guilds in some of these orders might put a lot of strain on the servers if it's calculated anew every time someone uses this feature. Maybe some of these orders could only be recalculated once per day and then the numbers cached? (Then there would be a message somewhere on the guilds page saying that it's doing that, and the time when it was cached, and that changes since then aren't shown yet in any but the default order.) *Keywords line at the bottom of guild description with search terms *"Advanced search" where you can look for guilds that contain the words X OR Y OR Z, or X AND Y AND Z. *Put a big link to the guild guide at the top of the list. **We could expand the guild guide. But it gets as unwieldy as the guilds list itself (it practically becomes its duplicate), plus no one would ever manage to keep it up to date. * Automatically sort active vs. inactive guilds based on chat logs **"Hide Idle Guilds" switch on the guilds list. **Two tabs for public guilds - "active" (chat in last 2 weeks or month?) that shows up by default, and "inactive" that can be tabbed to. Search pulls results from both lists. **Refresh automatically once every 24 hours. *Consider official H guilds run by proven volunteers a different category from ones started up generally. **At the top of the guild list could be official guilds, then "featured" guilds, then other guilds. When an other guild becomes successful enough, it could move up to featured (and vice versa when needed). **The current system makes it hard for a new guild to go anywhere and further separation would only make that barrier worse. Reasons why ill-fated guilds get created and ideas to address them *Fandom and game guilds typically have a short lifespan. *Keyword search works only if the name or description makes sense. *People new to Habitica don't know the difference between guilds and parties. *Sometimes guilds are too specific and should be a thread in a more general guild. *Guilds are created to discuss one particular challenge. This would be improved if we were able to chat about the challenge in the challenge itself. This is a medium-to-long-term fix (it would take a while to build). *Players create guilds without being committed to staying on the site. We could have a deputy leader who would be automatically made leader if the original leader went AWOL. If a guild leader is told in advance that an absence of X weeks means that a new leader will be chosen, then the current one-year requirement could probably be dropped. Lemoness would have the final say. **install a caretaker, with a message to the creator that if they ever return to Habitica, that they need only ask for it back. Veto by @Alys **An option to select who the deputy should be, and if no option is selected from the guild members, then have ownership automatically be transferred to a mod after, say, a year. So, say @Alys is the mod listed in the code, all guilds with AWOL leaders of more than a year would automatically pop up as @Alys' guild - assuming there is also some way to code a notification of such to Alys (or whomever). **If a guild leader hasn't logged in for over a month (or maybe 2 or 3), the next person on the members list who has logged in more recently automatically becomes guild leader. If the code can't find an active guild member, the guild is dead - in that case, admin should probably get a message "This guild is scheduled for deletion - go ahead? (Yes/No)" Making public guild cleanup faster or easier *We could deal with abandoned guilds more quickly if making the guild private was the default action and we reserved boarding and plundering just for those guilds where the leader has been absent for 12 months or more. **We'd end up with a ton of private guilds full of inactive players that would never be deleted. To protect the servers, admins could do an occasional sweep of the database and delete any private guilds where the leader has been absent for more than 2 years. *Automatic process to privatize guilds, then delete them a while later according to certain criteria. **Processes sometimes need exceptions and automatic systems sometimes fail. We could start with an "automatic process" we follow manually. When we see how well those rules work, we can consider automating them. *If the guild creator says, "Oops! No, I didn't know there was already a guild. I don't need this guild any more," there should be an easy way of refunding the gems to them and deleting the surplus guild. **Admins can already do this in under a minute when the guild owner asks. *Automatic notification to a mod of an AWOL leader Category:Guilds